The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

“Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time,” Theo reflects, which could be a metaphor for his own life. We start with a bright, artistic youth who doesn’t see how he fits into the world around him. Things happen to him over which he has no control, leading him from one disaster to another. He survives them all, thanks to improbably good luck more than anything he does. In the end, he concludes that beauty and love make life worthwhile in a world without meaning.

Theo loses his mother early in the story, but spends most of the 770 pages of the novel searching for a father. His own is absent, even when he’s present, and offers little stability or the connection that Theo needs. “Rotten luck” is his father’s explanation for the world. The father of his best friend, Boris, is also absent and violent, but he cares for his son in his damaged way. Theo is drawn to other father figures and finds one in Hobie, the antique restorer.

Like the furniture, Theo mainly sits around and lets the big events of his life happen to him. He initiates nothing and lets other people drag him from one catastrophe to another. Even the love of his life drifts in and out and he makes no serious move to hold on to her. (Although, she gives him no encouragement, and he tries to respect that.) This is the part of the novel that I found a bit off-putting. For long sections of the novel, Theo lives a passive and repetitive life, with nothing happening to advance the story, and little of interest in his internal rambling.

When I started the novel, it seemed to be a post-traumatic reflection of America’s reaction to the terrorist attacks of the early 21^st century. The explosion that Theo survives marks him in ways that the author occasionally describes as a PTSD reaction. But if this is a reflection of America in PTSD, then it’s floundering passively. (Is that what it feels like to some people living in America? It it’s not what’s happening to people living in Iraq or Afghanistan, or to those in America living with the security response.) But if America’s PTSD is one way of looking at the story, then what does it mean that Theo’s best friend, and the person who resolves his crisis, is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian criminal? Boris is clearly the antithesis to Theo, dynamic, self-driven to excesses of food, alcohol and drugs, but the only character who succeeds in getting anything done. (Actually, I find him the most attractive and memorable character in the book.) The other Americans are decadent wasters who spend their lives throwing away the wealth they have access to or ripping off other people. Even lovable Hobie, the careful craftsman who makes the objects of the past perfect again, can’t run his own workshop without someone else keeping him from bankruptcy. And Theo’s love interest Pippa, who survives her childhood trauma to become a caring and skilled musician, leaves the country. She takes up with a Britisher who, in Theo’s eyes at least, is a bit of a loser as well. Perhaps by way of balance, the Europe that Theo sees seems to be equally corrupt, criminal and decadent.

As I reflect on the book, I’d call it a sad satire on contemporary America. It’s quite comic in places, pointing out the emptiness of high New York culture as well as the Las Vegas desert. The good dad Hobie, Theo’s real bad dad, and Theo’s nihilistic best friend, all observe that good and evil are mixed up in the world, and it’s hard to separate one from the other. The art and beauty that Theo says give life meaning come only from the remnants of a European past.

In spite of which, Theo’s story is an engaging one. I always felt that he was a flawed human being like the rest of us, and I hoped he’d pull through somehow. The length of the story means that a reader spends time getting to know him, and even the slow parts didn’t make me want to quit reading.  The story is one that remains with me because it’s a vivid and detailed picture of a sense of anomie that I could empathize with.